If You Think Monitoring Your Kids On Facebook Is Enough To Keep Them Safe Online, You Have No Clue

WASHINGTON (AP) — After Friendster
came MySpace.
By the time Facebook dominated social media, parents had joined
the party, too. But the online scene has changed — dramatically,
as it turns out — and these days even if you're friends with your
own kids on Facebook, it doesn't mean you know what they're
doing.

Thousands of software programs now offer cool new ways to chat
and swap pictures. The most popular apps turn a hum-drum snapshot
into artistic photography or broadcast your location to friends
in case they want to meet you. Kids who use them don't need a
credit card or even a cellphone, just an Internet connection and
device such as an iPod
Touch or Kindle
Fire.

Parents who want to keep up with the curve should stop thinking
in terms of imposing time limits or banning social media
services, which are stopgap measures. Experts say it's time to
talk frankly to kids about privacy controls and remind them —
again — how nothing in cyberspace every really goes away, even
when software companies promise it does.

"What sex education used to be, it's now the 'technology talk' we
have to have with our kids," said Rebecca Levey, a mother of
10-year-old twin daughters who runs a tween video review site
called KidzVuz.com and blogs about technology and educations
issues.

More than three-fourths of teenagers have a cellphone and use
online social networking sites such as Facebook, according to the
Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project. But
Facebook for teens has become a bit like a school-sanctioned prom
— a rite of passage with plenty of adult chaperones — while newer
apps such as Snapchat and Kik Messenger
are the much cooler after-party.

Even Facebook acknowledged in a recent regulatory filing with the
Securities and Exchange Commission that it was losing younger
users: "We believe that some of our users, particularly our
younger users, are aware of and actively engaging with other
products and services similar to, or as a substitute for,
Facebook," the company warned investors in February.

Educators say they have seen kids using their mobile devices to
circulate videos of school drug searches to students sending nude
images to girlfriends or boyfriends. Most parents, they say, have
no idea.

A stay-at-home mom of eight kids in Burke, Va., Eileen Patterson
said she used to consider herself fairly tech savvy and
frequently spends time on Facebook. But she was shocked to learn
her kids could message their friends with just an iPod Touch mp3
player. She counts nine wireless devices in her home and has
taken to shutting off her home's Wi-Fi after 9 p.m., but she
describes her attempt to keep tabs on her kids' online activity
"a war I'm slowly losing every day."

"I find myself throwing up my hands every now and again,"
Patterson said. "Then I'll see something on TV or read an article
in the paper about some horrible thing that happened to some poor
child and their family, and then I try to be more vigilant."

Mobile apps refer to the software applications that can be
downloaded to a mobile device through an online store such as
Apple's iTunes.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, there are some 800,000
apps available through Apple and 700,000 apps on Google
Play.

Among the most popular mobile apps among kids is Instagram,
free software that can digitally enhance photos and post them to
your account online. Kids on Instagram whose parents closely
monitor their text messages, Facebook posts or emails can also
chat with their friends using the service. Their photos can also
be shared on other social media sites such as Facebook, which
bought Instagram last year.

Then there's Snapchat, among the top 10 free iPhone
apps available. Snapchat lets a user send a text, photo or video
that purportedly self-destructs within 10 seconds of being opened
— or warns a user if the recipient takes steps to quickly capture
it for posterity before it disappears.

Snapchat acknowledges on its website that messages aren't
guaranteed to disappear: Anyone receiving a text or photo can
within 10 seconds capture a "screenshot," taking a photo of their
device's screen, and save that image. Video also can be
downloaded, although Snapchat says it alerts senders when
material is saved.

Instagram is considered tame as long as kids adjust their privacy
settings to limit who can see their photos and don't post nudity,
which could subject them to child pornography laws. But Levey
said many parents don't know their kids are using Instagram until
there's trouble — usually when kids post inappropriate photos at
parties and these begin to circulate among their social circles.

Parents often hand their kids a mobile device without
understanding exactly what it can do, said Dale Harkness, a
technology director at Richmond-Burton Community High School in
Richmond, Ill. He estimates that even without using social media
services, the average high school student probably transmits some
150 texts a day.

"It's not anything that every parent and grandparent hasn't
already seen," Harkness said. The problem, he adds, is that
actions "get documented, replayed and sent around." He said that
students "forget how fast it moves and how far it goes."

That was the case at Ridgewood High School in Ridgewood, N.J.,
where a male student allegedly took a screenshot of nude pictures
sent to him by female classmates via Snapchat, then posted the
pictures on Instagram. According to a letter to parents by the
school district's superintendent that was later posted online,
police warned students to delete any downloaded pictures or face
criminal charges under child pornography laws.

There are general security concerns, too. F-Secure, a
cybersecurity company, said some new social networking services
have become targets for spreading malicious hacker software and
propagating scams.

In January, the FBI arrested a man in Los Angeles, Karen "Gary"
Kazaryan, 27, of Glendale, Calif., on charges that he hacked into
hundreds of social media and email accounts, including Facebook
and Skype, and
found nude photos and personal passwords that women had stored
online. He allegedly used the photos to try to coerce women into
disrobing for him via Skype and threatened to post their private
photos to their Facebook accounts if they refused to comply,
according to the indictment.

Online services also routinely collect personal data, such as a
person's birthdate or the location of their phone, and they
commonly share the information with third parties for marketing.
While a new rule by the Federal Trade Commission this year is
aimed at keeping advertisers from tracking kids younger than 13,
most social media services require that a user specify he is at
least 13, exempting the account from the tougher privacy
restrictions.

Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., co-chairman of a House caucus on privacy
issues, said legislation should give kids under 15 the right to
delete photos or texts that wind up elsewhere online. The
prospect, however, is unlikely in a Congress dominated by debates
on federal spending and gun control, and raises practical
questions about how such a law could be implemented or enforced.

"Nobody should be penalized for something they posted when they
were 9 years old," Markey said.

Levey links her kids' devices to her iTunes account so she's
aware of programs they install. She also requires that her kids
make their accounts accessible to her and follow certain ground
rules: protect your passwords, set privacy controls and never
transmit inappropriate pictures or words.

A big hurdle for parents is overcoming the idea they are invading
their kids' privacy by monitoring online activity, she said. In
fact, she said, it can be the kid's first lesson that hardly
anything online is private, anyway.

"If they want privacy," she said, "they should write in a journal
and hide it under their mattress."

___

Follow Anne Flaherty on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/AnneKFlaherty.

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